Re: GNOME and non-linux platforms (release team please stand up)

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:

On 22 Jul 2009, at 15:56, Johannes Schmid wrote:

OK, I can install all those in a virtual machine but just the amount of
work I had to put in for basic testing cannot be really done in my free
time.

That's certainly true for many individual contributors, which is why I also said we ought to "to figure out how to better distribute the development and QA workload to make that happen".

However, for people who make their living developing GNOME software, IMHO it behooves them as professional open source software engineers to respect the requirements of the other people who will be using the code they write, insofar as those requirements are known up front.  And right now, every professional GNOME developer knows up front that GNOME isn't confined to running on Linux, so that should figure fairly strongly into their design work.

I am extremely grateful for all that Sun has done to move GNOME forward over the years--indeed much of that has benefited everyone including Linux. But, pardon me for pointing out the pink elephant in the room: why doesn't Sun just admit that (Open)Solaris is a dead-end?

I mean, we all understood that Solaris was proprietary until recently. But now that Sun has admitted that wasn't going to work, why not just go the next logical step? ZFS is nice and all but you *do* hold the copyright. If the right managerial decision were to be made--say tomorrow--we wouldn't be having this conversation and Sun wouldn't even be out any business.